Adam Levine: American Idol Tries To “Mask” Homosexuality

Adam Levine graces the cover of the August 2011 issue Out, and shoots from the hip throughout his interview. The Maroon 5 singer talks about the importance of queerness in rock frontmen (“Look at the best ones, guys whose sexuality was always questioned. Bowie. Jagger. Freddie Mercury. I wouldn’t be the front man of a band if that question hadn’t come up at some point”), calls the music industry “extremely intimidating and also completely dismantled,” and, when asked about his involvement with It Gets Better, takes shots at Perez Hilton before turning around and giving him credit:

“Perez asked me to do it,” he says. “I found it strange that one of the biggest bullies on Earth is asking me. I was really not a fan of his. I thought he was part of the problem. In doing this, I was hoping for a change in him, and I saw one. The guy has changed his tune quite a bit. I respect that.”

The harshest words from “the breakout star of The Voice” (Out‘s words) were reserved for American Idol. “I can’t f—k with American Idol. It’s a cultural institution,” Levine begins, before proceeding to do exactly that.
“What’s always pissed me off about Idol is wanting to mask that, for that to go unspoken,” Levine complains to the magazine. “C’mon. You can’t be publicly gay? At this point? On a singing competition? Give me a break. You can’t hide basic components of these people’s lives.” He doesn’t say as much, but it sure sounds like he’s talking about Adam Lambert, who certainly fits the frontman model Levine sets forth earlier in the interview, and whose sexuality became a subject of public discussion during his stint on Idol—which Lambert himself discusses in his episode of Behind the Music, currently streaming in full on our site. It doesn’t hurt Levine’s case that four contestants on The Voice, two of whom made it to the finale, were openly gay. While we don’t know the legal details, we also suspect that The Voice contestants were given slightly more leeway about what information they could share (e.g. on Twitter) during the show’s run.